Category Archives: Food

We’ve all been there (if you live in Hawaii): you go to a party, multiple people bring boxes of malasadas, and at the end of the party there are way too many left over. Throwing them out would be criminal, but they never taste as good as they did when they were fresh and hot.

If you have room temperature malasadas, you can microwave them for ~15 seconds and get something pretty decent. You can also put them in a toaster oven for a while, which turns the sugar into something crisp and creme-brulée-like. But if you have a whole bunch, you may get tired of that too.

I present to you an innovation in malasada-reuse: the malasada bread pudding. It makes sense, since malasadas are eggy, and bread pudding can be made with brioche or other egg-based breads. I had the idea for this, but the recipe is all Yuka. We made some this weekend, and it came out great. With Mardi Gras (aka Malasada Day) coming up, give this recipe a try:

In a medium mixing bowl, beat eggs, add cinnamon and a pinch of nutmeg. Then add milk, sugar, and vanilla. Beat until well mixed. Pour over bread, and lightly push down with a fork until malasadas are covered and soaking up the egg mixture.

Bake in the preheated oven for 45 minutes, or until the top springs back when lightly tapped.

Enjoy! Wasted food is an abomination, and making use of food that would otherwise be wasted reduces your carbon footprint. :)

I got this recipe from a co-worker at LavaNet a few years ago (Hi Tim!). It makes a lot of cups, and has proven to be a crowd-pleaser. Mahalo to Yuka for transcribing the original version from a printed fax to electrons. Enjoy.

Makes 36 cups

Ingredients:

1 box of cook and serve chocolate pudding (5.9 oz box)

milk for pudding

1 package of Oreo cookies

2 packages of cream cheese at room temperature (8 oz each)

3/4 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

chocolate chips (optional)

Cool Whip/whipped cream (optional)

Equipment:

3 muffin tins (if you have less than 3, then you will have to bake in batches)

36 paper muffin cups

Mixer (hand or stand)

Mixing bowl

Saucepan

Steps:

Cream together sugar and cream cheese in bowl with mixer.

Add eggs and vanilla extract.

Line muffin tins with muffin cups.

Place 1 Oreo cookie at the bottom of each cup. You can put a whole cookie in each cup, or twist them apart and put half a cookie in each. If you have less than 36 Oreos (but more than 18), splitting the Oreos is a good way avoid buying another package.

Spoon one heaping tablespoon of the cream cheese mixture into each cup on top of the cookie.

Bake at 350° F for about 10-12 minutes, or slightly golden brown.

In the meantime, make the chocolate pudding as directed on package.

Take the muffin tins out of the oven, and let them cool at room temperature.

Also allow the chocolate pudding to cool slightly.

Spoon the chocolate pudding onto each cup.

If using chocolate chips or Cool Whip, add them now. If using whipped cream, add just before serving.

Just saw this article about how eating some meat might reduce one’s overall environmental footprint. The study found that while a vegetarian diet used the least amount of land area, it required all the land area to be high-quality agricultural land. Adding a small amount of meat and dairy to that diet uses more land, but some of that is pasture land, which is more abundant in the New York state area and necessary for crop rotation anyway.

Note that the land required for the typical American diet of lots of meat is much greater than either scenario above. So no surprises there.

Simply Ono is a catering/lunchwagon business that has set up an outpost in the Biomedical building on the UH campus. They are located in a room that opens onto the makai-diamondhead courtyard. The prices are reasonable, the portions are large, and they have an array of gourmet plate lunch dishes that rotate weekly.

Govinda’s is a vegetarian place on the UH Manoa campus, in the Sustainability Courtyard near Kuykendall Hall. They email out their monthly menus (often after the month has started :) but don’t post it online anywhere I could find. So here is their menu for October 2007. The items with “V” are vegan.

Nihon Noodles is a new ramen restaurant that opened in the old Neo Nabe location next to Bunmedio bakery on King St. They boast Hakata, Tokyo, and Sapporo style ramen. Yuka and I both tried the Hakata-style ramen, and I ordered 3 pieces of gyoza. The gyoza came out several minutes before the ramen, which is a bad sign (gyoza almost always takes longer than the ramen at a good place). The gyoza weren’t terrible, but tasted like they were bought frozen and then cooked.

The ramen itself was not very good. The noodles were cooked too long, and there were too many of them for the bowl they were served in. The broth was OK, nothing special. My char siu slice was pretty tough (I could not bite off a piece when holding it with chopsticks).

We were the only customers during the time we were there, and there were more employees than customers. Not a good sign.

We won’t be going back, even if we had a coupon. The problem for a new ramen shop is that Honolulu already has several excellent ramen purveyors. Thus, it’s not enough for a new ramen shop to be OK or good, it has to be as good as or better than the competition. I’m going to call this the incumbent threshold.